University of Massachusetts Medical School Rebrands After $175M Gift

The University of Massachusetts Medical School is celebrating its 50th year of educating future physicians, nursing leaders and biomedical scientists and its Nobel Prize-winning research enterprise growing to $400 million.

The school is also commemorating an unrestricted $175 million donation from the Morningside Foundation — the philanthropic arm of venture capital and private equity firm Morningstar — that will more than double its endowment.

As a result of the gift, the school will be renamed the UMass Chan Medical School for the Chan family who started the firm in 1986. Its three graduate schools will also be renamed. The T.H. Chan School of Medicine will be named for the late patriarch of the Chan family, who was deeply committed to supporting higher education. The Tan Chingfen Graduate School of Nursing has been named for the family’s matriarch, Tan Chingfen, a nurse who administered vaccines to neighborhood children in the 1950s. The Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences is named for the Chans’ firm and foundation.

“This gift is a powerful statement about the stature — and the potential — of our medical school, a very special place,” UMass Medical School Chancellor Michael F. Collins said in a statement. “The confidence this historic gift conveys about our medical school is breathtaking, permitting us to recruit renowned and innovative faculty, conduct more breakthrough biomedical research, offer financial support to highly qualified and diverse students; and be ever more expansive in fulfilling our public service mission.”

In 2014, Morningstar Foundation gifted Harvard $350 million, prompting the school to rename its school of public health to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

“The Morningside Foundation and the Chan family are proud to honor their patriarch and matriarch’s legacy and their deep commitment to the advancement of health and education,” the Morningside Foundation said in a statement. “There is a powerful alchemy and very special culture at UMass Medical School in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”